Connor Wilson » Blog Archive » How bad does DreamHost suck? Uhh… They don’t

How bad does DreamHost suck? Uhh… They don’t

Posted on May 5th in Personal — 12 Comments so far. Got something to say?

In response to the Elliot Back article, “DreamHost sucks at Hosting“, I’d like to take this time to tell you that they don’t. I’m sure Elliot is a respectable guy, and a lot of people read his blog, but he has a classic case of “hate-the-host-im-not-on” syndrome. Mix it in with a need to get on Digg, and a little bit of “all the cool kids are doing it” and there you go

I’ve been with DreamHost since October ‘06 and while not a painfully long time, I’ve been in contact with support a bunch of times and have experienced a lot of what they have to offer. I’m on the basic plan, which I got my free domain (this one) and a ton of transfer and space. By now I’m running 227GB of disk space (which I fill 0.3GB of) and 2496 GB of transfer (which I’ve used 0.6GB so far this month).

All that, and I payed $25 seven months ago. Not bad, right? Well, now let’s do some myth shattering!

The Uptime is Horribly Ridiculous

FALSE! Any one with any brain would see this in a week. I’ve never had any downtime (to my knowledge, of course) except for the three days I caused myself a while ago. I’ll give you guys a little tip on this one… Web hosts don’t get to where they are or grow to proportions such as DreamHost with bad uptime. 99% is bad nowadays, so any good host will give you 99.95% yearly, at least.

The Speed Is terrible

Your website is too heavy anyways. Everyone can use a good lightening no matter what host they use, so this is unrelated.
Send them an email through support telling them you’re disappointed with he performance of your server.
That same day you’ll be rocking a new server, speedy and ready for what you can throw at it.

This is where your own being a customer comes in. With any host, they should switch your server that easy if you ask nicely. Or not nicely, like I did when I switched a while back. DreamHost has hundreds of thousands of sties hosted (rumored to be 300k+), and when I, the insignificant dot told them that I’d be switching if they couldn’t fix the spedd problems and switch my server, and they actually do it, and within the hour, that’s incredible. Any other host that size would’ve given me a swift pat on the back and shown me the door.

The Support is slow and useless

FALSE! Anyone’s support is slow and useless if you don’t use it right. Fill the form out correctly, including your knowledge level, etc… and they will get back to you usually in 6-12 hours. I’ve had responses in 10 minutes!

As far as the quality of the responses, I’ve never seen anything saying it’s not great. They talk to you like a real person (nice for a change), and they don’t stop until your problem is solved. Still have more questions? Hit reply in your email client to continue the conversation.

My Reasons Why DreamHost is Great

I’ve grown to love the hosting I get from DH over the time I’ve been with them, and this is why:

Their private Whois option keeps all my info hidden. Countless times I’ve been relieved with this.
It’s cheap. We all know it.
No cPanel? I don’t really care. Coming from a cPanel host to DH wasn’t a problem at all. I though it would be, but I don’t miss anything.
I host 6 subdomains and 5 domains. I can host unlimited more.
Registering a domain with them. I don’t use GoDaddy because it’s way easier with DH. One click and its registered and hosted. I’ll be uploading to it in an hour.
PHP5, but you get your choice for each sub/domain. And you can change it later.
Ruby on Rails support.

And also, by the Stephen Colbert philosophy: The market has ruled. 300k sites hosted? Yeah, they must really suck if they have that many sites.

So in conclusion, I hope Elliot enjoys the Digg attention and his new found web-cred by saying DreamHost sucks. The data collected is really useless because no one will do anything about it. It’s like a survey conducted saying that cell phones cause cancer. Does that mean that everyone will stop using cell phones? Definitely not. Because DH oversells, does this mean they suck? No, they don’t. I’m on a likely oversold server and couldn’t be happier with the performance and uptime.

Leave a comment

Josh Buckley
May 5th, 2007 at 4:02 PM

Elliot Back has deleted his article or something?
Connor Wilson
May 5th, 2007 at 4:35 PM

Yeah, the Digg submission is gone too. I wonder what happened there, it’s not usual for a story to just disappear.
Sergio Alvaré
May 5th, 2007 at 7:15 PM

Esto no es más que basura. Mi página está inaccesible cada dos días, lo que me dificulta montar algo medianamente serio.
Sergio Alvaré
May 5th, 2007 at 7:17 PM

Bueno, mágicamente acaba de ser arreglado. ok.
Razor
May 6th, 2007 at 9:32 AM

Hey dreamhost rules xD.. well it didnt for the first few days i was with them. But once they sorted the servers out it was plain sailing.

i luv ma nehi server xD
L3ggy
May 6th, 2007 at 5:27 PM

I’ve been thinking of switching to them. But its more than i need realy
Razor
May 6th, 2007 at 5:31 PM

L3ggy if you wanna get dreamhost for real cheap

use this coupon, MDDR
Connor Wilson
May 6th, 2007 at 6:27 PM

Nono, you have to click the link at the bottom of this site
Razor
May 6th, 2007 at 7:38 PM

yea or that u get a great discount… for connor
Elliott C. Back
May 8th, 2007 at 10:08 PM

No, I have not taken it down. It was a temporary user-glitch with WP. Somehow the post was set to protected!

I can’t agree with your points, however.

Here’s a report for their main domain, which shows 99.3% uptime: http://uptime.besthostratings.com/viewreport.php?host=dreamhost If they can’t keep their main domain up, they can’t keep yours. Most of it is not caught, since they have many servers, which go down randomly. Here’s one example: http://blogs.tech-recipes.com/davak/2007/02/25/dreamhost-downtime-7hrs/

The speed is terrible. Their machines can be horribly overloaded. It’s not acceptable. I like Media Temple’s approach, which guarantees that you’ll have sufficient resources at any given time, not DH’s, which rolls the dice…

Support. Eh. That’s why I wrote my post. You’re right, it took them very little time to disable my account. Maybe minutes, who knows! It took them two days and a media scandal to get my domains back.
Connor Wilson
May 10th, 2007 at 6:58 PM

Ouch, bad time for a WP glitch, eh? Maybe WordPress’ weakness to diggs is true?

Maybe DreamHost is bad, but I don’t see it because of my last host being the worst possible. You think 7 hours is bad? Try 450
Jd P
May 22nd, 2007 at 3:36 PM

The last 5 or so responces from support I have gotten back were received in less than 10 minutes from their respective quiries, and were not even marked urgent. Love this article. Keep em coming.